German company Bitmanagement Software brought a federal lawsuit against the Navy back in 2016. The complaint claimed the Navy agreed to license the 3D virtual reality software.
To print this article, all you need is to be registered or login on Mondaq.com.
Bitmanagement Software GmbH v. U.S. raises important
issues for any company licensing software to the U.S. government,
particularly those that utilize third-party resellers.
Under this decision, even when the government acquires a license
with express limits on the scope of the government s rights
(e.g., limiting installation to a set number of computers), the
parties conduct may give the government an implied license to
use the software beyond the scope of the express license (e.g.,
vast deployments across government networks). However, even
Ahoy There : If License Terms Not Clearly Intended to Be a Condition Precedent, It’s a Covenant Thursday, March 4, 2021
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that the US Court of Federal Claims erred by failing to consider defendant’s non-compliance with the terms of an implied license, vacating the claims court’s finding of non-infringement and remanding the case for a calculation of damages.
Bitmanagement Software GmbH v. U.S., Case No. 20-1139 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 25, 2021) (O’Malley, J.) (Newman, J., concurring).
Bitmanagement Software filed suit against the US government for infringement of its copyrighted graphics-rendering software, BS Contact Geo. The claims court found that Bitmanagement had established a
To embed, copy and paste the code into your website or blog:
The Federal Circuit handed a substantial victory to Bitmanagement Software GMBH last week, finding the U.S. Navy had infringed the company’s copyright by installing its three-dimensional visualization software on hundreds of thousands of government computers without using license-tracking software to monitor and limit the number of simultaneous users. The court’s decision is significant, not only in affirming the lower court’s finding that an implied-in-fact license existed between the government and Bitmanagement despite no privity of contract between the two (who transacted through a reseller), but also in taking the further step of holding the Navy to a key condition of that license, one the Navy failed to meet, with the potential for a hefty damages award to the software vendor.